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One thing I struggle with is eliciting target speech sounds during less structured activities—-that step when you want more than single words or phrases…but know that errors creep back in in conversation (well, and eliciting them in conversation can also be challenging to do/tricky to keep accurate data on). Play-based activities can be great (e.g. playing with a toy farm to elicit many opportunities to produce initial /f/, legos for medial /g/, having child request different cars for /k/, constructing a snowman for s-blends, etc.), but sometimes I really like to get in more practice!

One way to do this is to a) have a child try to retell a story you’ve read together (another reason I love using picture books during therapy) or b) to use stories specifically made with your artic target in mind. I started making some stories of my own after finding Heidi Hanks’s (of Mommy Speech Therapy) so helpful. She has free downloads for the word, sentence, and story level for most sounds, and her app (Articulation Station) is structured the same way. The app also has “Level 2” stories for older students who don’t need the visual aids (and both levels have a few comprehension questions after each story).

Below are some of the “stories” I’ve made up using Boardmaker. With primarily pre-K students, my kids aren’t reading, so having visual aids helps them to retell the story (I usually read it first). I hope they’re helpful! Will have to make up some new ones soon…

In our pre-K program, we’re lucky to run a weekly hour-long group that integrates speech/language/motor/sensory/social work. This means planning activities along with our awesome Occupational Therapists and Social Worker. We typically start with a book we all love and come up with appropriate activities from there. Since I also work with the itinerant speech students (mostly kids with just articulation goals), I usually wind up also making up articulation activities to pair with the books.

Last week’s pick? If You Give a Moose a Muffin by Laura Numeroff. We chose our books based on a handful of favorite authors/illustrators this year, so you’ll see plenty more related to Eric Carle and Laura Numeroff!

Other activities: We acted out the story while reading it (prop suggestions: muffin mix box, clothespins, handkerchief/sheet, plastic blackberries & muffins, button, moose) and acted out the poem “10 muffins on the window sill” with our little puppet theatre, a moose puppet, and 10 plastic muffins. For our snack the kids got to enjoy corn muffins! Question of the day: what is your favorite kind of muffin?